increasingly impenetrable comments on my increasingly impenetrable activities

2025-12-01

1. Fic writing

The longboi is almost complete! Everyone is dead, as is right and proper.
Finally posted my /1character contribution. I’m trying to leave it a few weeks before I sign up again and just do another set of fills about Auron. I’m trying.
/yuletide … er … something’s happening I promise.

As is traditional for the time of year, I’m playing a game that has been semi-randomly allocated to me. (… Something’s happening I promise.)
I’m also doing repeated Academy Ace Tournament runs in Pokémon Violet for levelling up purposes.

Eight years with a certain @adt! I’m always very smug that our anniversary happens to be the feast day of an appropriate but reasonably obscure saint, despite the fact that neither of us is religious.

Two end-of-year concerts down and one remains. I really did not sign up to be a section leader when I joined orchestra number two, but seeing as my much-better-at-unnecessarily-redacted-large-string-instrument friend seems to be sitting out this season, I just have to hope I don’t spend too much time sounding, in his words, like ass.
Bought a new string for the unecessarily redacted large string instrument … wow it actually does make a difference. I should do this more often. And especially replace the two strings that have been on it for over 20 years and are turning green. This will probably be of use in the “not sounding like ass” department.

Finished Voltaire almighty at last … Roger, you’re a good lad and a credit to the north coast, but the level of detail in this is excruciating.
Just about started L’élégance du hérisson by Muriel Barbery. It sure would be nice to have read a whole two books in French this year that aren’t manga I guess.
I appear to have read more books (40) than I did in 2024, but seven of the books I’ve listed for this year are manga volumes and those have about two centimetres of text in them, so it doesn’t really seem comparable.

In the “potentially to follow up on later” bracket: this course on the western musical canon. I’ve been thinking about expanding my musical knowledge not in the sense of “actually it’s a dominant seventh” but in terms of music appreciation, perhaps.
Nice fanart of my guy.

Wrote a pretty terrible Python script in order to fill out a meme.
Made some very minor and subtle CSS changes to this site, in service of maintaining the scrapbooky vibe.
I worked out how to stop Emacs giving me a stupid warning when I edit remote files, so editing things on the server is even more straightforward now.
Trying out some slightly non-normie atproto stuff; I’m now using social.daniela.lol as the frontend and I’m also testing out Leaflet a bit, maybe. But, fundamentally, why would you when the fediverse and RSS are right there.

Teaching is over for the semester so I now enter Intense Assessment Phase One while also having to prepare a new module. Couldn’t I have prepared the new module before? Yes but I don’t want to have to give any thought to undergraduate teaching unless it’s extremely imminent. Also everything that ever happens in a university is done last minute, I promise.

Giving a talk at the alma mater this week … let’s hope the people who disagree with my perspective on the field don’t attend?? I also don’t think I have enough material for 50 minutes, but I guess we all get to go and have dinner earlier in that case.
It’s an Ulster Christmas this year so we’re heading to the bro goth ’gan tasow for the last week of the month.
I would love to be able to do some of the things on my rapidly increasing techbro ideas list … the “concerts being over” and “fic being over” state that we’ll enter after next Saturday may be conducive to this. December always feels like a big “sitting on the settee working on my website” time for some reason.
Theroma martesen o scrifa neppeth en kernowek keniver journa dres an mis bes nei a vedn gweles.